The Sun Bay Paper Page 16 January 28, 2022 - February 3, 2022 Marty Gottesfeld, 37, is an American political prisoner. There's just no other way to describe the self-taught, nonviolent techie/medical freedom activist now locked away in solitary confinement at a secret federal detention facility in Marion, Illinois -- after being transferred this month from a different secret center in Terre Haute, Indiana. Both are known as "communications management units" (CMUs) in prison industrial complex bureaucrat-ese. Or you could just call them un-American penitentiary black holes. Twice -- last June and this week -- I've asked the federal Bureau of Prisons to explain why Marty is being held in solitary confinement, how long he has been squirreled away and on what grounds he was transferred. "For privacy, safety, and security reasons," I was told, "the BOP does not discuss any individual inmate's conditions of confinement to include housing quarters or reasons for transfer." This past Sunday marked four full months that Marty has been in solitary and blocked from communicating with loved ones or the media. I first learned of Marty's plight -- and his heroism -- five years ago from his loyal and vigilant wife, Dana, whose words in defense of the dissident action he took that earned him a 10-year federal sentence have never left me: "It was the right thing to do." A quick recap for those who have never heard of, or have forgotten, the "Free Marty G" nightmare. In 2013, a young girl named Justina Pelletier was ripped from her parents' custody by Boston Children's Hospital. The teen, who has mitochondrial disease and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, had gone to BCH after coming down with a severe case of the flu. Instead of receiving top-notch care and attention at BCH, however, Justina was medically kidnapped and recklessly re-diagnosed with a psychological condition, "somatoform disorder." Justina was dragged from BCH's neurology department to its infamous psych ward, where she was reprimanded for being unable to move her bowels or walk unassisted in her weakened state. At the Wayside Youth and Family Support Network residential treatment center where she was confined, she and her family recounted to me in my 2018 documentary on the case, she was harassed by a staffer while taking a shower. The physical and mental torture lasted 16 months. Enter Marty G. In April 2014, he helped lead a social media army that implemented distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Boston Children's Hospital and the nearby Wayside Youth and Family Support Network residential treatment. Marty had organized a social media army to knock the computer networks of both institutions offline to protest Pelletier's medical kidnapping. Hackers from the loose-knit collective, Anonymous, allegedly participated in the campaign. Marty was charged and convicted of cybercrimes and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. He had already spent more than a year behind bars without bail at the time of his sentencing (including about 80 days in solitary confinement and a stint in the same detention center as Mexico's notorious drug cartel kingpin "El Chapo"). He has no regrets about stepping up in Pelletier's defense and continued his whistle-blowing investigative journalism after his imprisonment with Dana's help -- until the feds tried to shut him up and shut him down after reporting on the plight of other CMU inmates. The last time Dana spoke to Marty was last September. The last time she was able to see him in person was at his sentencing three years ago -- yes, years -- this month. Last summer, BOP officials had recommended that Marty be removed from the Terre Haute CMU. Instead, he was hauled from one American Gitmo to another. "We were devastated to find out that the placement of Marty in the CMU will continue," Dana told me this week. "There was never any good -- or even comprehensible -- reason to place him in that ultra-restrictive unit that was created in the 9/11 era. The BOP's decision to continue placing Marty in the CMU shows that the pattern of harassment and retaliation that Marty faced when he began speaking publicly about conditions in BOP facilities continues." Dana added that "less than two-tenths of 1% of federal inmates are held in the CMUs. Many of them are members of radical Islamist terror organizations. The BOP has never given a reasonable explanation for why it has chosen to hold Marty, a nonviolent person never previously convicted of a crime, in these specialized prison units. I believe the BOP is continuing to retaliate against Marty for his decision to speak publicly about conditions in BOP facilities, ranging from damp and freezing cells, nonpotable water, to misconduct by a BOP unit manager." The Justice Department's inspector general passed the buck on Marty's case to the BOP Office of Internal Affairs. Marty's complaint has fallen into yet another black hole. If you're outraged that this is happening in America and want to help, visit: freemartyg.com/ for more information. Fighting human rights abuses starts here at home, inside our borders, for our fellow citizens. Michelle Malkin Exposing America's Secret Prisons: #FreeMartyG We spent so much money on welfare programs that many families with two unemployed parents collecting all the government payouts could get $100,000 or more from taxpayers and not work a single hour. We continue to provide billions of dollars a year to subsidize wind and solar power, which accounts for about 7% of our total energy production. Much of the $100 billion for schools remains unaccounted for. No one seems to know where the money went, and nobody seems to care or wants to do anything about it. The $6.8 trillion the government spent in 2021 was $2.4 trillion more than the government spent in 2019 before the pandemic started. The feds have spent close to $4 trillion in two years to contain COVID, which hasn't been contained. Gee, that's been money well-spent! Could things with the virus be any worse if the government had spent nothing and there had been no shutdowns? This might be the most epic failure of big government in world history. Yet Biden is saying with a straight face that the problem with the economy and inflation and runaway energy prices is that we didn't spend $5 trillion more for his Build Back Better monstrosity. So, we have a House Budget Committee chairman, when asked about the wisdom of running $2 trillion deficits each year, saying: "We can spend and borrow whatever we want." No worries. They're spending money like it's M&Ms. Even the New York Times admitted that Biden's spending schemes offer Americans "cradle to grave government." Is that what Americans want? Are we like Linus, the "Peanuts" cartoon character who carries his blanket like a security vest everywhere he goes? Biden's solution to the budget and borrowing blowout is to tax, tax, tax. But in 2021, Americans paid $4 trillion in federal taxes. That was 18% of our GDP, which is above the recent historical average. There is not a revenue problem today in Washington but a pandemic of spending. In my new book, "Govzilla," I document the relentless historical growth of government in America. We were supposed to have limited government but now we have limitless government. In just his first year, the spending proposed under Biden exceeds what was spent on all the wars we have fought, the building of the intercontinental railroad, the interstate highway system and the moon landing. The spending monster Govzilla is devouring our economy and our freedoms. At least Reagan tried to fight back against the tyranny of big government -- sometimes successfully, sometimes not. His warning when he ran for president in 1980 was as prescient now as it was then: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have." Meanwhile, Biden says that his trillions of dollars in spending "are free -- they will cost nothing." Actually, the costs are incalculable. Stephen Moore Runaway Government Spending Cont from pg 1 Martin Gottesfeld is a human rights activist facing up to 15 years in federal prison under the CFAA for helping save Justina Pelletier.
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